How the bay was saved / Development threatened to fill it in

How the bay was saved: Development threatened to fill it in. Chronicle photo illustration by Lance Jackson

How the bay was saved: Development threatened to fill it in. Chronicle photo illustration by Lance Jackson

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How the bay was saved: Development threatened to fill it in. Chronicle photo illustration by Lance Jackson

How the bay was saved: Development threatened to fill it in. Chronicle photo illustration by Lance Jackson

How the bay was saved / Development threatened to fill it in

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The 10 people who gathered at a home high in the Berkeley hills in January 1961 had no idea that their meeting would open a new chapter in U.S. history.

Nor could they have suspected that a sequel to their work would be the explosion of "green" activities in 2007 as a response to global warming.

I had been invited to that meeting by someone who introduced herself as Kay Kerr, Mrs. Clark Kerr. "A couple of friends and I," she said, "have been very disturbed about the filling of the bay. We're planning a meeting of conservation leaders to talk about it. We know your book, 'San Francisco Bay,' and we hope you'll join us." The two friends were Berkeley residents Sylvia McLaughlin and Esther Gulick. The meeting was at the Gulick home overlooking the bay. It included representatives from the Sierra Club, Audubon, Save-the-Redwoods League and local conservation groups.

Kerr and her friends laid out the problem: San Francisco Bay was growing steadily smaller. Its primary use, other than shipping, was for sewage and garbage disposal. On the afternoon breeze in Berkeley you could whiff the persistent "East Bay stink" -- the aroma from untreated sewage.

At night you could see the bay on fire where garbage was dumped in the shallows and set ablaze. The bay was being filled for airports, harbor facilities, freeways, factories, salt production, shopping malls and subdivisions.

The city of Berkeley had plans to double its size by filling 2,000 acres offshore. Other cities had similar intentions. If all the plans went forward, most of this superlative body of water would disappear.

So the three women asked the group meeting in the Berkeley hills: What can be done to save the bay?

One by one the conservation leaders responded. The Sierra Club was pouring most of its resources into opposing dams in the Grand Canyon and couldn't launch any new campaigns. The Redwoods League was busy saving the forests. Audubon was occupied with trying to preserve critical bird habitats.

David Brower of the Sierra Club concluded: "It looks like there will have to be a new organization. We'll give you our mailing lists and help you all we can."

So Kerr, McLaughlin and Gulick, to their surprise and dismay, were left holding the bag.

My own feeling was that any attempt to stop the filling of the bay would be hopeless. In 1961 there were almost no environmental laws on the books, and nobody had ever heard of an environmental impact statement. As an issue, the environment did not exist.

The post-war building boom was under way, and battalions of bulldozers were flattening woods, farmlands, orchards, hills and waterways. Any opposition was stonewalled with the mantra of that era: "You can't stop progress."

I was certain that the three Berkeley women were too naive and inexperienced to realize the bay was as doomed as the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley, which were being obliterated for subdivisions and eventual siliconization. The notion that the big-buck developers, the shoreline cities and some of the country's biggest corporations could be turned back by a few starry-eyed bay savers seemed preposterous. But I admired their idealism and kept my cynicism to myself. I soon had occasion to become less skeptical.

Unlike many do-gooders, they realized that protests were not enough. They would need a positive plan of action. So they promptly formed the Save San Francisco Bay Association, soon to be known as Save the Bay. Kerr coordinated the political strategy; McLaughlin did outreach, speaking to clubs and civic groups; Gulick managed the administrative paperwork.

They mailed out 700 flyers alerting residents to the threat of the bay's disappearance and were surprised to receive some 600 responses with pledges of support. They consulted economists, law experts, and biological scientists and assembled an impressive array of facts. The bay's shallows and tidelands, they learned, were incubators of many forms of marine organisms that were vital to commercial and sport fishing and the ecological chain of life. Filling these areas would destroy the fisheries and create a biological desert.

The fills would also change the climate. The bay acts as a regional thermostat -- bayside cities are cooled several degrees in the summer by breezes off the water. Filling would result in hotter summers and less-temperate winters.

By 1963, Save the Bay was able to persuade Berkeley to shelve the plan to double its size by filling. But with other cities and corporations planning to fill, the group's leaders realized they would need action from Sacramento. They had some save-the-bay bills introduced in the Legislature and sent busloads of bay savers to hearings -- unsuccessfully at first.

A turning point came when Kerr was able to reach San Francisco state Sen. Eugene McAteer, whom she had met socially. He was a powerhouse in the Legislature, hoped to run for mayor of San Francisco and knew a good political issue when he saw one.

The cause had attracted some potent support from newspapers, civic leaders and celebrities such as radio-TV star Don Sherwood, who had a huge audience. But above all, the issue had captured the imagination of ordinary residents.

Membership in Save the Bay grew by the thousands, including people from other states who had fond memories of their visits here. The bay had an undeniable charisma. This shining expanse of water at the edge of the continent was a symbol of nature's beneficence, California's spectacular past and the historic promise of the Western Gate.

McAteer was able to push through a bill creating a study group that evolved into the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. It was an ingenious innovation, the first agency in the country to limit regional development, with unprecedented power over cities, counties and private developers. Its permission was required for anything built or dumped in the bay.

McAteer had a fatal heart attack in 1967, before the commission received final approval from the Legislature. By 1969, the three Berkeley women, after eight years of unremitting toil, sweat and tears, could lift their champagne glasses in victory.

Their success was not limited to its effect on the bay. In retrospect, the save-the-bay campaign, beginning in 1961, marked the origin of the environmental movement. Although it had roots in the conservation movement, which had also started here when John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, conservationists were focused on wild lands and national parks.

The first person I heard use the word environment, in the sense we now know it, was Kerr. John W. Gardner, a former Cabinet officer and later founder of the reform group Common Cause, had made a speech in UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall on the problems confronting the nation. Kerr, who had known him socially through her husband, the UC president, charged up to him afterward and said: "Why didn't you talk about the environment?" He was obviously taken by surprise and could only mumble.

That new usage came to be part of the American vocabulary and a symbol of radical new cultural values. The save-the-bay effort was the first major revolt against the dominant postwar mind-set of unrestricted development, the mandate of "progress," the tyranny of bulldozers. It demonstrated the power of grassroots action in a democracy and provided a model for emulation elsewhere.

The most immediate reaction came from Southern California, where most of the ocean coastline was being walled off by beachfront luxury houses. Ellen Stern Harris, a leading activist for parks there, was inspired by the success of the bay savers to propose a similar effort on a much larger scale. She suggested to a committee of the Legislature that the bay commission model be used to control development along the entire California coast.

Other activists, including publicists Janet Adams and Claire Dedrick, who had very effectively lent their talents to the bay campaign, enthusiastically promoted Harris' idea, as did various chapters of the Sierra Club and local conservation groups. The result, after a long struggle similar to the bay effort, was the 1972 passage of Proposition 20, creating the California Coastal Commission.

The new commission was headed by the same leaders who had guided the bay commission -- Chairman Mel Lane, the well-connected publisher of Sunset Books; and executive director Joe Bodovitz, a former newspaper reporter with an intimate knowledge of state and local politics.

The bay campaign had helped inspire similar local battles to curb the bulldozer throughout the Bay Area. Plans for freeways through Golden Gate Park and around the San Francisco waterfront were defeated, as was an effort to build a nuclear power plant on scenic Bodega Head. There was a gradual proliferation of local groups like the Committee for Green Foothills, Save Mount Diablo, San Bruno Mountain Watch, the Greenbelt Alliance, San Francisco Tomorrow and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, which set a pattern for land trusts preserving farmlands and open space throughout the country.

On New Year's Day 1970, President Richard Nixon with much fanfare signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which embodied that revolutionary instrument, the environmental impact statement, required of all federally financed projects. Most states later enacted equivalent requirements. The environment had become a major force in American politics.

Fast forward to 2007: 46 years after Kerr, Gulick and McLaughlin founded Save the Bay, the bay is some 40,000 acres larger than it was in 1961. Save the Bay, now headed by David Lewis, has organized similar groups into a national network, "Restore Our Estuaries," ranging from Puget Sound to Chesapeake Bay to Galveston Bay in Texas.

After a period in which the environment was eclipsed nationally as a political issue by wars, epidemics, crime and corruption, the threat of global warming has pushed the environment again into the headlines. In the resulting rebirth of environmental concerns, this region is again playing a leading role.

San Francisco may soon have the world's greenest building when the new home of the California Academy of Sciences opens in Golden Gate Park. The city's proposed Public Utilities Commission building at the Civic Center will have similar innovations, including solar cells and wind turbines. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature have shattered precedent by cooperating across party lines to cut the state's emission of greenhouse gasses by 25 percent within 14 years.

PG&E, once the bane of environmentalists, offers rebates to consumers who reduce their use of natural gas. Peter Dundee, the corporation's CEO, concerned with power-plant emissions of greenhouse gases, has issued a statement that would have been unbelievable coming from a leading industrialist at any previous time in U.S. history. He told The Chronicle's David Lazarus: "Congress needs to impose regulations on us." Other industrialists asking for emissions restrictions include heads of General Electric, Alcoa, DuPont, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has long been involved with reduced-emission projects and energy-efficient devices, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Its director, Nobel physicist Steve Chu, plans to make it a world center of green technology, financed by BP's munificent $500 million grant. Meantime, Silicon Valley venture capitalists are eager to lead the green-tech boom.

Kay Kerr, feisty as ever at 96, watches over the bay from her home on the Berkeley Hills. Esther Gulick died at 84 in 1995. Sylvia McLaughlin nimbly climbed a UC Berkeley oak tree shortly after her 90th birthday to protest the university's planned removal of many oaks for a new athletic building. And she maintains her interest in Save the Bay and works for expansion of the East Shore State Park, which she helped create. It now occupies the shoreline between Richmond and North Oakland.

It would be absurd to compare saving the bay to saving the Earth, which will require revolutionary changes in the way all of us on this planet live and work, but it should give us courage and perspective to remember the first environmental activists, who didn't realize that what they were trying to do was impossible.